Criteria for Biblical and Liturgical Translation into Tseltal, Nahuatl, and Spanish as a minority language: An Activist Translation Paradigm

Abstract

This paper aims at problematizing the issue of acknowledging and reviving native and minority languages in Mexico, Latin America, and the United States as a result of a programmatical boost by the Catholic Church looking to translate liturgical and biblical texts together with the participation of aboriginal communities. Specifically, we examined the translation criteria applied by linguistic teams, consisting of native speakers who have been working with Tseltal and Nahuatl languages for the last 40 and 6 years, respectively. Their criteria were compared with criteria followed by the linguistic team that has been working for the last 14 years with Spanish as a minor language in the u.s.a. The method of analysis is contrastive-comparative, based on critical observation in the field, interviews with main participants, and the study of primary sources. That information was taken at workshops held by the national Náhuatl translation team, between 2017 and 2018, and from the Indigenous Language Bible/Liturgical Translators’ Meeting hosted by cem (Mexican Conference of Bishops, as per its initials in Spanish) in Mexico, 2018.  Problematizing cultural translation, as a key action in the struggle to dignify ethnic groups, is viewed under the lenses of Latin American decoloniality and Indigenous theology, which we put within the framework of postcolonial theology. cem’s agential role, translators’ training asymmetries, freedom of organization, the need to define translations processes and criteria, including the points of agreement and disagreement, are among the main findings reported.